Post by Norma Coates, University of Western Ontario

This is the eleventh post in our “Honoring Hilmes”series, celebrating the career and legacy of Michele Hilmes on the occasion of her retirement. 

“An advisor is forever,” Michele Hilmes said to me soon after I received my PhD. I probably responded with “bwah hah hah.” I had accepted a job at UW-Whitewater because of my family’s desire to stay in Madison. And, now it can be told, my separation anxiety. How would I survive in academia away from Madison and MCS, and away from Michele’s sage advice and calming presence? As it turns out, I found that perhaps you can go home again – home being your graduate school – but you should leave for a while first. Michele knew that, and probably did not think that mine was the best decision, no matter how much I rationalized it to her and to myself. She never said anything negative about it – not to my face. She smiled her inscrutable smile and, as she had through my dissertation writing, let me make my own mistakes. My dream of continuing to attend colloquiums and to run my work and ideas by Michele for her critique and suggestions – that is, to maintain our grad school advisee/advisor relationship – evaporated quickly as I dealt with a 4/4 teaching load, a two-hour round-trip commute, a toddler, and a department with no like-minded thinkers. More to the point, Michele could no longer give me that type of attention nor, I think, did she want to. Logistics and workload aside, I learned from Michele that advising is much more than reviewing chapter drafts.

Like Michele, I have too many advisees. I now understand the demands that all of her advisees, including (especially?) me, made on her time – time that is far more precious than grad students know until they, too, join the professoriate. I now understand the haunted look that greeted me when I knocked on her shut door to have one of my periodic meltdowns. (Michele says that she could predict them.) Advising is much more than picking out courses, reading and commenting upon work, and eventually writing letters of recommendation for your (and other) students. Advising is being willing to put aside your own writing to work on your advisees – even when you’re not willing. If she minded, she did not show it.

Michele taught me that advising is about the advisee, not the advisor. From her, I learned to try to not impose my vision of what the student should do or say, but to get the student to express her voice and her ideas. She also showed me building the advisee’s confidence and leading her to trust her instincts is as important as going through her work. Whenever I work with an advisee who has gone down a rabbit hole or who is too snarled up in a thicket of what she thinks she “should” do instead of what she wants to do, I remember Michele’s patience with a few of my dissertation detours. She waited for, and trusted, me to find my way out on my own, sometimes gently suggesting me toward a better path. A great advisor, like Michele, teaches the advisee to listen to, and more importantly trust, her own voice.

From Michele, I learned that an advisor is also a midwife at the birth of an academic career. She taught me that an advisor encourages her advisees to establish a professional profile early and often. An advisor does not hide from her graduate students at conferences, even if she wants to, but introduces them to others working in their area. An advisor finds opportunities for her advisees to provide research assistance for her projects, or to contribute to their writing. An advisor continues to take an interest, and even help promote, her advisees’ careers long after the dissertation is finished. And sometimes, the advisor will continue to socialize with the advisee, and even host them for a stay when they return to town.

Michele’s advice is always with me, in the ways I described above and in the form of questions as I write, think, and plan my scholarship. I pose similar questions to my advisees. Am I asking the right questions? Am I clear? Do I have enough evidence? What am I really trying to say? Is this historicized enough? Do I believe in what I am arguing? Why is this here? Am I making the right connections? And the biggest one of all, what would Michele think of this? After all, an advisor is forever.

Bascom Hill at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Photo: Jeff Miller ©UW-Madison University Communications

Post by Michael Curtin, University of California Santa Barbara

This is the eighth post in our “Honoring Hilmes” series, celebrating the career and legacy of Michele Hilmes on the occasion of her retirement. 

Jonathan Gray’s post about mentorship and collegiality eloquently captures the collective sentiment of this online festschrift in honor of Michele Hilmes. Having worked closely with her as a faculty colleague, I can vouch for Jonathan’s account of her sterling leadership and professionalism. I want to comment briefly on the latter before offering some observations about Michele’s intellectual contributions to our field.

University professors can be pretty self-absorbed and, in a way, they have to be in order to run the gauntlet of tenure review and endure the stark loneliness of academic authorship. You have to believe deeply in yourself and your intellectual vision in order to simply persist as a scholarly researcher. The danger is that one can spend a bit too much time alone and attach a bit too much significance to one’s own vision. In the collective life of a department this becomes most evident when faculty members and graduate students begin to personalize the differences that inevitably arise in the course of departmental affairs. What’s truly remarkable about Michele is that she knows how to get the work done without personalizing the differences. Instead, she’s focused, clear-headed, articulate, and even-handed. Consequently, she can pull folks together and get things done under even the most challenging circumstances. Moreover, she does it in a confident but unassuming way that simply exudes professionalism. So, “best colleague ever?” Yes, without a doubt, and I might add, a role model for the profession.

Equally inspiring is the fact that Michele’s investment in the general welfare of the department hasn’t detracted from her scholarly accomplishments. She has, for example, published truly pathbreaking historical monographs over the course of her career. Hollywood and Broadcasting was one of the first media histories to direct our attention to the synergies between radio and cinema during the 1930s. Previous research had generally considered these media separately (indeed entire departments and programs were built around the differences), overlooking the important interconnections that shaped the evolution of American popular culture. Moreover, the book anticipated the groundswell of interest that arose regarding media “synergies” during the conglomeration wave of the 1990s. Hollywood and Broadcasting became a touchstone for many conversations on this important topic.

Michele’s second book, Radio Voices, was the first critical and cultural history of radio broadcasting in America, comprehensively addressing issues that had previously been under-appreciated, such as class, ethnicity, gender, geography, and national identity. She extended this scholarship into the television and new media eras with her landmark textbook, Only Connect, which is without a doubt the best cultural history of US electronic media that is currently available for classroom use. During my days as a graduate student, Erik Barnouw’s Tube of Plenty was the standard point of reference for media historians and instructors, a status it enjoyed for decades because it was both comprehensive and comprehensible. As any book publisher will tell you, there’s something to be said for understated eloquence. Barnouw and Hilmes: that’s pretty heady company.

Michele’s most recent monograph, Network Nations, was the first history to carefully compare the development of British and American radio broadcasting, exploring the many tensions and interconnections between the two. As is well known, the British public service and the American commercial systems became the two most influential templates for the development of electronic media around the world. Network Nations shows that although the two took decidedly separate paths, they were self-consciously constituted through their respective differences. That is, British media evolved partially in response to national conditions and partially in response to its imagined other, the commercial cacophony of the American airwaves. Likewise, the US networks strove to distinguish themselves from the elite and measured qualities of British radio while claiming to serve the desires of the listeners first. As Hilmes explains, the ongoing dialogue between executives, creative talent, and policy makers played a foundational role in the constitution of electronic media on both sides of the Atlantic and it resonated further afield, establishing the fundamental parameters of media polices  forged in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and other parts of Europe. Network Nations has become an invaluable resource for research and teaching about media globalization.

So, think about it for a moment: three monographs (each a landmark), many anthologies, departmental leadership, superb teaching and mentorship, and as my festschrift collaborators have so eloquently affirmed, a profound influence on the development of radio and sound studies. Not bad. Days well spent… and many more to come. Congratulations and thank you, Michele.

From April 10-12, 2014, scholars from around the globe converged on Columbia, Missouri to support, critique, and shape an ever-widening community of feminist media scholars at the Console-ing Passions conference. Hosted by the University of Missouri and organized with great care and attention by Melissa A. Click (organizing chair), Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz, Julie Passanante Elman, Hyunji Lee, Holly Willson Holladay, and Amanda Nell Edgar, this year witnessed CP turn twenty-two years young. First held at the University of Iowa in 1992, Console-ing Passions was initially dedicated as a space where feminist scholars could present work that interrogated the place and investigated the importance of gender to the study of television. Since then, CP has broadened its scope with respect to both objects and critical orientations. Conversations within and between panels tackle television, video games, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other digital/new media platforms with consideration not only of feminist concerns, but also those of queer theory, affect theory, disability studies, and critical race theory.

This penchant for intersectionality made for a particularly provocative opening plenary in which Nancy Baym (Microsoft Research), Radhika Gajjala (Bowling Green State University), Katherine Sender (University of Auckland), and Beretta Smith-Shomade (Tulane University) were asked to reflect upon the current strengths and weaknesses of feminist media studies and what that field must focus its attention on in order to remain both academically effective and politically relevant. Baym called for an increased attentiveness to labor in feminist media studies and offered the reminder that “no matter how much we love each other, there are economics behind our relationships.” Gajjala stressed the fact that questions of future feminist research are also deeply entwined with questions of future feminist praxis. For Sender, new media technologies have begun facilitating reflexivity in new ways that feminist media studies should take care to notice. And Smith-Shomade was adamant about the fact that the role of women in history still waits reclaiming and reframing, warning that we continue to layer history without understanding what came before.

As a second-time attendee, one of the things that has and continues to impress me about Console-ing Passions is the accommodation of both breadth and depth among panels and workshops. At this year’s conference, two of the most prominent topics across the conference program were questions of fandom and digital gaming culture. The former was exemplified in panels such as “Queer Fandom, Resistance, and Identity,” “Scenes of Fan Labor,” “Gender, Race, and Transnationality in Music and Fandom,” and “Performing Fandom in Online Communities,” while the latter came to the fore in “Monstrous Moms, Undead Dads, and Bossy Boyfriends: Gender, Gaming, and the Ties that Bind,” “Gender and Sexuality in Games and Gamer Culture,” and “Gendered Spaces in Gaming.” But if there was an objet/texte du jour at this year’s CP, it was surely ABC’s primetime drama Scandal, with provocative, animated, and insightful papers given by Kristen Warner (University of Alabama), Alfred L. Martin, Jr. (University of Texas at Austin), Suzanne Leonard (Simmons College), Rebecca Jurisz (University of Minnesota), and Brenda Weber (Indiana University).

Comparing my two experiences thus far at Console-ing Passions (2012 and 2014), I was particularly struck by this year’s emphasis not only on the heritage and pedigree of the organization (i.e., where have we been?), but also on assessing the future contours of feminist media studies as a field (i.e., where are we going?). This dichotomy was taken up with particular rigor at a workshop entitled “Who Do You Think You Are?: Academic Lineage and Disciplinary Boundaries Across Media Studies” that included participants Elana Levine (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Melanie E.S. Kohnen (New York University), Courtney Brannon Donoghue (Oakland University), and Matthew Thomas Payne (University of Alabama). For Levine, studying television as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was doing feminist scholarship, among a group of colleagues and faculty that were primarily invested in the relationships between TV and social identity. Kohnen’s remarks regarding making space for queer and feminist scholarship and pedagogy at conservative institutions asked such important questions as “How do we teach queer and gender studies when we always expect resistance from our students?” and “How do we invite students into difficult conversations without alienating them?” Donoghue’s comments focused upon the difficulties of teaching global media in a cinema studies department, encouraging us to “get beyond medium specificity not just with our students, but also with our colleagues.” And Payne truthfully admitted that his participation in this workshop was to “proselytize on behalf of play,” on behalf of the freedom and innovation that play and agentive experimentation can bring.

As an ABD graduate student preparing to enter the academic job market while completing a dissertation, no network of colleagues and friends has provided me with more support than Console-ing Passions. To that point, I was thrilled that this year’s conference placed an added emphasis on mentorship, particularly of graduate students and junior faculty. A mentorship luncheon, the brainchild of organizing chair Melissa A. Click, was an event that I hope will continue well into the future and foster other mentorship opportunities as Console-ing Passions continues to grow as both an organization and a community.